The world of
The Devil All the Time may be geographically just a few dozen miles south of Columbus, but
psychologically, it's deep in the heart of hell.

Author Donald Ray Pollock worked at a paper mill in Chillicothe for more than 30 years before
earning a master's degree from Ohio State University and publishing the acclaimed story collection
Knockemstiff in 2008.

His novel begins just after World War II, when Willard Russell returns from the South Pacific
with horrific memories. When the bus taking him to the West Virginia town where he grew up stops at
a diner in Meade, Ohio - "a little paper town an hour south of Columbus that smelled like rotten
eggs" - he falls immediately in love with Charlotte, the waitress. He travels on to West Virginia
but soon returns to marry her.

Twelve years later, the two have a son, Arvin, and Charlotte is dying painfully of cancer.
Willard spends equal amounts of time drinking and praying.

"As far back as he could remember," Arvin thinks, "it seemed to him that his father had fought
the Devil all the time."

As Charlotte's health deteriorates, Willard and Arvin spend more and more time at a "prayer log"
that Willard has found in the woods, where they scream to an indifferent God and make increasingly
bloody sacrifices.

Arvin eventually ends up in West Virginia, where he comes into conflict with a spider-wrangling
preacher and his pedophile partner, who is wheelchair-bound after testing his faith by drinking
antifreeze. Meanwhile, back in Meade, a corrupt young sheriff discovers that there are "a lot of
advantages to being the law in a place as backward as Ross County, Ohio." And a husband-and-wife
pair of serial killers are resting in Meade in between jaunts around the Midwest and the South.

The appalling acts these characters commit, and are subjected to, might be unbearable in other
hands, but Pollock keeps a certain distance, not wallowing in the details and leaving most of the
worst to the imagination. He doesn't extend forgiveness to the characters, but he makes even the
most evil of them understandable.

He also has the driest and darkest sense of humor. It both cuts through and sharpens much of the
horror, whether he's describing the sheriff's belly, "starting to hang over his belt like a peck
sack of dead bullfrogs," or the preacher's solution, when working at a carnival, to win back the
crowd from "the more exciting and less serious distractions" of the carnival: "Every couple of
minutes, he'd stop preaching and pull a squirming worm or a crunchy roach or slimy slug out of an
old bait bucket and chew on it like a piece of candy."

Beneath the gothic horror is an Old Testament sense of a moral order in the universe, even if
the restoration of that order itself requires violence. As Pollock pulls the strands of his plot
together, they reveal patterns both surprising and inevitable.